A Few of Our Favorite Postman Things
There were so many new Postman releases last year, such as two major versions and a ton of new product features and enhancements, summarized nicely by my colleague Arlemi in his 2021 retrospective post. With so many to choose from, I decided to ask the people on the Postman team what they’re especially appreciating about the API platform as we start 2022 with even more to come.
Would everyone like the shiny, new stuff better? Or would they stick to the trusted standbys? Let’s take a look at a few of our favorite Postman things. Then learn how to participate in our first contest of 2022.
The Postman favorites
When I polled a sample of my colleagues about their favorite features in Postman, I wasn’t sure what to expect.
Just how does a developer tool become a “favorite” anyway? Is it because you use it all the time? Or perhaps you love a tool because it helped you do that one thing one time when you couldn’t figure out how to do it otherwise? Or maybe you used it to avoid so much pain and suffering?
As expected, people’s favorites are heavily influenced by their job function. Turns out you’re going to love the integrations if you spend your days automating API workflows. On the other hand, if you are chatting it up with API producers, maybe you lean towards the API design and development features.
Top 5 picks from the Postman team
1. Scripts: Scripts are foundational for many other features. If you’re going to run tests, build a monitor, or visualize data, you’re going to need a script for that.
“Scripted workflows allow me to model complex, real-world use cases and conduct true-to-life acceptance and end-to-end testing.” —Kevin Swiber, API Lifecycle Integration Specialist
2. Monitors: Monitors are primarily used for monitoring the health and performance of your APIs, but plenty of Postmanauts use them for all kinds of scheduled automations.
“I have a lot of cron job scripts and webhook setups which solve a couple of problems for me such as organizing football every Thursday or running the demo day bot in Slack.” —Sivcan Singh, Technical Lead
3. Workspaces: The Postmanaut love of workspaces is primarily for collaboration purposes, among the team or with the broader community.
“Public workspaces bridge the gap between large organizations and API enthusiasts creating opportunities to build a whole new connected community.” —Sapna Nayak, Design Manager
4. Collections: It’s quite possible that many Postmanauts didn’t even consider collections as a nameable feature since they are the underlying foundation for so many of the other features in Postman, like documentation, mocks, monitors, and more.
“A collection is such an easy way to represent this otherwise weirdly vague thing called an API. They give me a very quick glance at all the resources available. Plus, it’s super flexible. I can use it as a reference, or I can go crazy with scripts and create an entire app out of it.” —Vineet Kumar, Director of UX Design
5. API Network: The API Network rounds out the last of the top picks. It’s no surprise that Postmanauts are a big fan of APIs, so discovering new APIs in both the Public API Network and Private API Network ranks well.
“The Public API Network has the power to be an elegant solution to the biggest problem facing consumers of APIs (lack of documentation) and the biggest problem facing producers of APIs (lack of time).” —Rebecca Johnston-Gilbert, Head of Marketing Operations
For many, it was tough to pick a single favorite feature. And the broad distribution of favorites was evident since no single feature won by a landslide among these Postman power users. Let’s see some other favorites in this video of Postmanauts sharing their choice:
Postmanauts telling us their current favorite Postman features
Tell us your favorite Postman thing—and win a prize
Tell us about your favorite Postman feature to win a limited-edition Postmanaut bobblehead.
To participate in the drawing, you must do the following.
- Tweet about your favorite Postman feature before January 27, 2022
- Include the
#PostmanFavoriteshashtag in your tweet
During this Postman Livestream on January 27, 2022, winners will be selected at random using an API from Twitter’s Public Workspace. The tweet must include a Postman feature and the hashtag #PostmanFavorites. Only one tweet per tweeter counts towards the drawing. You do not need to attend the stream in order to win.
Good luck, and we can’t wait to hear about your favorites!
What do you think about this topic? Tell us in a comment below.